1. Modernity's consciousness of time and its need for self-assurance --
2. Hegel's concept of modernity: Excursus on Schiller's "Letters on the aesthetic education of man" --
3. Three perspectives: Left Hegelians, Right Hegelians, and Nietzsche: Excursus on the obsolescence of the production paradigm --
4. The entry into postmodernity: Nietzsche as a turning point --
5. The entwinement of myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno --
6. The undermining of Western rationalism through the critique of metaphysics: Martin Heidegger --
7. Beyond a temporalized philosophy of origins: Jacques Derrida's critique of phonocentrism: Excursus on leveling the genre distinction between philosophy and literature --
8. Between eroticism and general economics: Georges Bataille --
9. The critique of reason as an unmasking of the human sciences: Michel Foucault --
10. Some questions concerning the theory of power: Foucault again --
11. An alternative way out of the philosophy of the subject: communicative versus subject-centered reason: Excursus on Cornelius Castoriadis: the imaginary institution --
12. The normative content of modernity: Excursus on Luhmann's appropriations of the philosophy of the subject through systems theory.